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Their explanation doesn’t help much and there are a few things working against them: 1. This is not the first time they have done these “hey guys check out thi
by cmiles8 27d ago
Their explanation doesn’t help much and there are a few things working against them:
1. This is not the first time they have done these “hey guys check out this breakthrough!” announcements where others quickly came along and say “hey, not so fast.” (Eg Erdos) So, specifically in maths their reputation is not good.
2. They’re blurring the lines between commercial cutthroat developments and the gentlemen’s code of sorts re what’s acceptable in academic research. They were working from material non-public insights into other research, which is why they even tried to poke at this in the way they did. Doing that without collaborating first was a pretty jerk move no mater how you slice it.
3. There’s still lots of open questions about how novel the solution was and the timing here where this “test” only happened after other researchers say they fed OpenAI models at least part of the solution is a little too convenient to gloss over. OpenAI statements here to date on the matter have been rather fuzzy.
All that combined with OpenAI’s less than stellar reputation on ethics is why folks are reacting the way they are right now.
- jdm2212 27d agoRE item 2 -- in lab science, it is entirely normal to have competitive-verging-on-adversarial relationships between labs racing to get results first. Mathematicians apparently need to get used to the idea that math is a lab science now. And that is a good thing! Competition moves us forward much faster than sitting on results to avoid hurting someone's feelings.
- cmiles8 27d agoI don’t think this is the same thing. Legit competition is of course good. But taking what was arguably a leak and then using that divert massive sums of compute (not available to the other researchers that were using their systems) to then get ahead is where it gets ethically dubious.
- jdm2212 27d agoLevent Alpoge is an Anthropic employee with access to Anthropic compute who routinely throws that at problems and then posts the results on Twitter. They thought they were competing with him! And they in fact were. It's just that in this case he supposedly was acting in a personal capacity, even though he was using internal Anthropic models for some of the work.